Building resilience through integrated and adaptive programming has become an increasingly important component of development projects. 

NORC conducts rigorous research and evaluations to help organizations adapt programming and scale innovations meant to reduce vulnerability, improve food and water security, and drive inclusive economic growth that enables learning and self-reliance. 

Drawing on our robust in-house expertise and longstanding relationships with local partners, we implement innovative mixed-methods evaluation and data collection approaches for complex resilience contexts, including: 

• Rapid assessments
• Survey techniques to interview hard-to-reach populations
• Harnessing geospatial data
• Developing indicators to complement standard household survey measures
• Implementing direct measures of resilience, water, food security and nutritional status—for example, through water quality testing and anthropometry

Our experience spans a wide range of agriculture and resilience contexts in over 30 countries. In Niger, we led a mixed-methods summative evaluation of three USAID Development Food Assistance Programs, assessing the effectiveness and sustainability of the interventions to improve household and community agricultural productivity, health and nutrition, livelihoods, early warning systems, and resilience.

In Senegal, our quasi-experimental impact evaluation of USAID’s Yaajeende Activity generated learning on whether and how a nutrition-led agricultural approach impacted household food security, poverty, malnutrition, and resilience. 

In Honduras, we led a mixed-methods evaluation to understand how and why household food security, nutrition, poverty trajectories, and resilience are changing under Feed the Future programming.  

In Indonesia, we designed and implemented an impact evaluation of USAID’s IUWASH Tangguh activity to provide learning on household water security impacts and city-wide water service resilience.